Remote work may be shrinking the hiring pipeline for young workers

AI-generated writing.

Six years into the remote-work era, the data shows an equilibrium: about 26% of work days are now done from home, down sharply from the pandemic peak but no longer falling despite high-profile return-to-office mandates. One overlooked cost of that equilibrium is on entry-level hiring. Training a junior employee already takes months before they generate net value, and that ramp-up is slower and costlier over Zoom than in person — so some research argues companies are responding by hiring fewer young workers and more experienced ones who need less hand-holding.

Gen Z workers seem to sense this: a Gallup survey found they’re the generation most opposed to full remote work, not because they dislike work but because they want the mentorship and shadowing that’s hard to replicate remotely. The risk researchers flag is a scarring effect — a cohort that entered the workforce during a structural shift toward remote hiring, gets less on-the-job training as a result, and could carry that gap forward for years.